White mansions

White mansions rock like old madames

fing'ring mem'ries in their lap.

They watch o'er niggras hauling cotton

cross fields slaves once trod.

The intenseness of their gaze cause fires to flair

in woods once guardian to lingering smoke.

Wisteria drapes them front and back

a Godiva clad in tangles and knots.

The weathered boards of their yellowed flesh

witness to tales hid behind their web-framed house.

Who cares what visions twinkle in their eyes

curtained behind the glaucoma of their frosty panes?

Who'll sit long among their wizened boards

or press their ears to the blackened earth

to hear the blood gurgling in their hearts?

These old ones are too soon wrenched

from the history of our soul

our mem'ries shackled and twisted

and torn out of place.

*Thoughts of Alan Jones:

  -Knowledge without love can lead to despair.

  -...no matter how much truth we have seen about ourselves, it is never the whole truth.

  -From the believer's point of view, all our knowing has to be set in the context of grace and hope. Our knowledge is never full and final, and we may thank God for that.

  -Simple attentiveness puts an enormous question mark beside everything, and this question mark makes us anxious and brings us close to tears.

  -There's a sort of no-man's land in me with which I am unfamiliar, and yet which is very much my own.  It is the place familiar to all of us where we know ourselves and yet are strangers to ourselves.